Apple Spotlight Shifts – AI

Apple spotlight shifts from cars to robots

Apple pushes robotics as its car business moves off the table

Apple may be famous for its $200 billion a year iPhone lineup but the company has recently shifted gears when it comes to R & D, with its sights firmly set on the robotics sector.

As tech giants try to find new avenues for growth at a time when competition has become fierce on their traditional terrain, should we expect to see innovative new robots bearing the apple logo soon?

Here’s the latest scoop on what Apple has been experimenting with, and what the implications might be for the cybersecurity sector.

The evolution of Apple from desktop computer manufacturer to a laptop maker, and most recently the creator of the iPhone and iPad, a trio of Portable devices that revolutionised the way we communicate for work and pleasure, is legendary.

These innovations have propelled the company to ever increasing heights in terms of revenue and market valuation, with the company now worth $2.8 trillion – an amount almost equal to the GDP of France.

However, with major competition from rivals like Samsung and critics pointing out that the latest iPhone contains very few essential upgrades and is more an exercise in aesthetics, the company is seeking new avenues of growth.

Several years ago, Apple impressed investors and financial journalists when it announced an ambitious smart car project to rival Tesla. Unfortunately, this seems to be stuck in first gear with no realistic timeline for a viable product offering.

Instead, Apple appears to be investigating the potential of robotics – presumably with AI integration.

Like every piece of information about Apple’s, future activities, reports of its robotics research are mainly obtained through leaks and a fair amount of industry gossip. Word from Silicone Valley is that the manufacturer is developing two main prototypes:

A consumer robotics product with full integration to the companies of the devices.
A possible rival for the Roomba vacuum – which to date has been the most successful robotic home consumer product produced despite being in its 20th year.

Whatever these early prototypes end up becoming, it’s clear that smart devices are a major focus for big tech – and that poses a cybersecurity threat all by itself.

The impact of consumer robotics on cybersecurity

As the Internet of things continues to develop, electronic devices other than computers and mobile phones, that are both connected to the internet and sync with our other devices, are becoming the norm.

Given that we live at a time when cybercriminals have managed to carry out daring hacking attempts – even using the water monitor in a casino’s fish tank – the potential for denial of service attacks and takeover attempts on household robotic items could be huge.

Apple has generally been good at securing the privacy and personal data of its users, but as hacking attempts become more sophisticated, there’s no telling what cybercriminals could pull off.
Rather than placing the blame or expectation of safety on a single manufacturer, internet users should carefully consider what risks they are taking when they buy and use sophisticated consumer products.

As a general rule, if your device sends and receives data, that data needs to be backed up – and that’s where secure cloud storage comes in.

Our range of cloud storage solutions for businesses and households is the ideal place to start when securing your crucial data. Browse our range of packages today to get started,

Chat GPT down | AI Cyberattack

It Had to Happen – Open AI Cyberattack Leaves ChatGPT Down

OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has announced that it may have fallen prey to a DDOS attack in early November.

The company, which clocked over 100 million users recently, announced the potential attack and its intention to investigate how it was carried out.

Cybersecurity experts have long warned that ChatGPT may become the target of a cyberattack or hacking takeover attempt, and the recent incident shows that even one of the internet’s most well-known and popular sites can still fall prey to the ill intent of cybercriminals.

Ask ChatGPT: how did the hackers do it?

Almost all of us have experimented with ChatGPT by now, and whether the results were amazing, encouraging, or downright hilarious there’s no doubt that the technology has changed the way we work in 2023.

When we asked the bot how it got hacked, we got a long version of “I don’t know” – but cybersecurity experts at OpenAI think they’ve identified the cause of the recent outage.

Surprisingly, given ChatGPT’s sophistication, the method used to carry out the suspected cyberattack was relatively simple.

A DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attack is one of the most rudimentary but effective forms of cybercrime. Put simply, it’s a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic on a site.
DDoS attacks work by setting up a huge number of pings trying to access the website’s resources simultaneously.

It’s easy to imagine what would happen if a website that usually receives 1 000 visitors a day suddenly received 1 million visitors. Loading time would grind to a halt, and eventually the site may go offline entirely. This is exactly what happened to ChatGPT’s website earlier this month.

Some netizens initially expressed doubt as to whether the attack was really a DDoS or just a huge surge in the number of users in the wake of GPT 4 Turbo, OpenAI’s latest version of the hugely popular chatbot. However, cybersecurity experts believe that the sheer number of pings was far too high to have occurred naturally.

Cyberattack marks OpenAI’s most challenging month yet

November’s cyberattack incident is the latest in a string of controversies faced by ChatGPT.

The AI chat bot has been criticised for producing output that is factually incorrect and engaging in problematic – or even disturbing – conversations with its users as well as hallucinating.

The company’s recent boardroom coup in which CEO Sam Altman was forced to leave, subsequently joining Microsoft in a senior position, was the crowning event in an extremely trying month for the company.

How to avoid DDoS attacks against your business

Cybercriminals are always thinking of new ways to cause inconvenience for honest business people. To avoid a DDoS attack, it’s essential to ensure that the attack surfaces (number of resources on your website) are limited.

Using cached data may also help keep your site safe from DDoS attacks and help it recover faster if an attack occurs.

To increase your business’s overall cybersecurity, choose from our range of secure cloud storage packages today.

ChatGPT, the revolutionary AI Bot | AI Technology

Is ChatGPT the newest cybersecurity threat?

The hot topic at almost any workplace meeting or social gathering since its release in November 2022 has been ChatGPT, the revolutionary AI bot that can, it seems, write almost anything.

For those not yet familiar with this new technology, ChatGPT is fundamentally a chatbot that uses AI to answer questions or prompts by way of text. The functionality of this revolutionary AI includes capabilities such as search and code generation to create something as simple as a meal plan with a shopping list, or as complex as writing code for new technology.

As industries around the world deliberate on just how AI is going to influence the way they work in the years to come, cybersecurity experts are ringing alarm bells over the risks that this type of technology might soon pose.

From cybercriminals using ChatGPT to write malware code to a new generation of scam emails that sound totally legitimate, the risk horizon around artificial intelligence is escalating. Here are some things for business owners to look out for as the machines march nearer.

Bots can write now – and some of them are writing very bad things

Like school teachers and college professors around the world who have been astonished by ChatGPT’s ability to write essays that seem legitimate on the surface, cybersecurity managers are waking up to the conceivable risks that AI could also write dangerous scripts and code used to create viruses, malware, and ransomware.

Open AI, ChatGPT’s parent company, has tried to reassure the public that the product will not create dangerous or harmful text or computer code, but hackers could trick it into doing just that by varying the input that they use and the questions they ask it.
One of the risks associated with ChatGPT’s ability to write text is that fraudulent emails, including phishing scams, could be produced by the bot using almost perfect English grammar.
Errors in punctuation and grammar used to be noticeable tell-tale signs of fraudulent emails (especially with those written by non-native English speakers), but with advanced language AI this detection method has gone out the window.

It’s important to note that while ChatGPT itself is not malicious, it has the potential to be used in a sinister manner to create malicious code.

The sheer volume of output that an AI text bot can produce is astounding, and hackers can now rely on automated text generators to create thousands of words in a short period of time, potentially flooding the Internet with fake emails that are almost impossible to filter.

Can cybersecurity software stop AI in its tracks?

Cybersecurity providers will need to develop superior detection tools that can tell if an email has been written by AI or not, and Google has already announced that it will penalise machine generated websites.

Until these applications are reliable and available to the public, the risk of falling victim to ransomware and email scams may increase exponentially – and that calls for a top-level cybersecurity setup in every business.

Stay ahead of the bots with secure cloud storage

At a time when potentially dangerous communications and computer code are flooding the internet, and as cybersecurity experts explore the possibilities of using this revolutionary technology to overcome malicious threats, what can you do to feel secure?

To begin with, start to familiarise yourself and your employees with ChatGPT and use its threat detection capabilities to your own advantage. For example, if you suspect an email to be spam or phishing, ask the chatbot “is this email safe or a scam”. The chatbot has the ability to detect and classify unusual communication patterns and would likely advise you not to respond if it detects malicious language.

You can also stay one step ahead of the hackers and their AI sidekicks by browsing our range of affordable online cloud backup packages for businesses and households today. Ensure peace of mind for yourself and your business. No matter what happens to you data – if it’s backed up online, it’s never lost.